"After a disappointing showing by Windows Vista SP1, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (v.3244) delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS. Testing with OfficeBench showed a ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP with Service Pack 2."
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Member since:2006-07-04
Microsoft has "no balls" because they didn't completely throw away their old OS like Apple did?
Bullhockey.
1. Microsoft already did break away from their old OS, those old OSes being Win3x and Win9x. Apple took years longer to do that, and finally proved incompetent to do it. You think it was "balls" that made Apple throw away backwards compatibility? No, it wasn't some grand vision, they would've loved to be backwards compatible, but they tried and failed. It had nothing to do with "balls".
2. Apple has 1/10th the user base that Microsoft has (and probably only 1/50th the business userbase), and so can afford to piss its userbase off.
Although do note that Apple's frequent radical platform changes have pissed its developers off, resulting in less software. Not that Apple minds much, since A. their dream is for Mac users to run only Apple software anyway; and B. Apple's most recent platform change finally, at long last, succeeded in locking the big name Mac developers into using Apple's dev tools since those tools are required to make universal binaries.
3. Microsoft has "no balls"? Good gravy, they redid the entire Office UI, which took "balls". They did what you recommend, they said "f--k it, our UI is way overburdened, let's start from scratch", so you're totally wrong to say they don't have "the balls" to make changes when needed. And those Office UI changes are making lots of people that can't stand change piss and moan. Yet now you say they should have "the balls" to piss off their users even more by, for example, building on OpenSolaris, which would buy them nothing? Office shows that Microsoft has "the balls" to make changes when needed, but that doesn't mean they should make changes for no reason at all, and NT is just fine.
Speaking of OpenSolaris, I know you're a big Solaris fan, you've pimped it many times before. But there is no evidence that Solaris (or any *nix) is superior to NT as a base on which to build.
Having said all of that, I'll just add that in my experience, XP is way faster than Panther on similar hardware. So XP also being faster than Vista says nothing wrt Vista vs OS X. It could be that XP is faster than both. If someone wants to trash Vista's speed by comparing it with XP's, that's one thing, but I now see you and others claiming that OSX would blow Vista away too. Maybe someone should do a test regarding that. And in your case, let someone do performance tests on Vista vs Solaris. 
Actually, Deviate_X did post in this thread a Vista vs OSX comparison running on the exact same hardware.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18965&comment_id=286451
But Vista "won", so the comparison was dismissed. Seems people only approve of comparisons with results that jive with their preconceived notions.
Let Steve Jobs do his famous Photoshop benchmarks (the ones that "proved" every year that PPC processors blew away Intel processors (yeah, right)) with Vista and Leopard.
Edited 2007-11-24 17:34
Member since:2005-07-06
1) And yet the same design flaws keep coming back release after release after release.
2) They could have easily done it; provide the new operating system and on a second cd include Virtual PC plus a Windows XP image to allow legacy applications to work ontop of it.
3) I don't use OpenSolaris, but given the continuously cycle of problems with Windows NT, you'd think that with 79,000 employees they'd be able to deliver an operating system on budget, ontime, and actually performing equal to Windows XP on the same hardware.
4) Nice to see you *IGNORED* what I posted in regards to his post. It was all gushy bullcrap. "ooh, ahh" - who cares about the 'ooh ahh' give me cold hard numbers for Christsake!
All I saw from the article was 'ooh aah' - making it no more scientific than someone claiming their car goes faster than their friends because its colour happens to be red!
Member since:2006-04-05
That was true back then.
(I could go on and on explaining how the MASSIVE amount of cache in the early G3's contributed to that, then how the brilliant SIMD delivered by AltiVec contributed to that, then how hacks like L3 cache contributed to that as well, then how the G5 blew the socks out of the Pentium 4 in FP math, and then how Intel finally went back to the drawing board with the Pentium M/Pentium D/Core/Core2 architectures they narrowed, closed, then surpassed the gap while IBM sat on its hands designing embedded processors and believing Apple would be more than satisfied to buy them and sell them as the latest word, then had their bottoms kicked by WWDC'05 when Apple announced the transition... But we're past that, right? I'll chalk your comment up to needing to say something related to the "megahertz myth" just to evoke the kinds of sentiments that were around then and make myself sound righteously outraged at the "RDF". You're smarter than that, so, please, don't go down to that level.)
Member since:2006-04-05
-1 (discussion-wise, evidently not mod points)
(Open)Solaris is optimized for throughput, not latency. It's a great kernel, but still needs to go a long way to really fulfil the requirements of a desktop OS.
+1.
Member since:
2005-07-06
The issue isn't the lack of 'big improvements' but even *little* improvements. I mean, sure, within 12 months, I don't expect Windows Vista to have a massive leap forward but when Microsoft developers have had over 12 months to tune and optimise Windows Vista - I'm asking, what the heck is happening? I'd expect at least *some* sort of improvement. The fact is, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 benchmark showed *NO* improvement. Not even a small a improvement.
Why compare it to Windows XP? One would assume that by the time Windows XP SP3 had rolled around (5 years of development plus several patches), they had optimised almost everything they could possibly optimise without causing major compatibility issues. Yet, even with all this work, they could still optimise it further.
As for UAC, I doubt it'll happen. I'd love to see Windows become a better platform. It benefits me as an end user knowing that the internet is safe from having millions of drones out there spamming. The issue is that Microsoft has no balls. When it comes to making big decisions, it appears that Apple has been the only one in the last decade who said, "f--k it, our operating system stinks to high heaven, lets break with the past and replace it with something better" - and so they did.
Here we are, after 3-4 years of initial pain and suffering, all the better for it. I'm now got a laptop which multitasks smoothly, the performance is light years ahead of when I first used Mac OS 9 with one of the first iMacs released. Yes, there was pain, there was suffering, but in the end, it was worth it. Now we see Mac OS X go from strength to strength.
Mac OS X has gone from being a cute 'joke' to being a robust UNIX '03 certified distribution with all the perks of a rock solid foundation and a beautiful GUI sitting on top.
Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft drop Windows NT, the whole damn line - adopt OpenSolaris as the core, and build upon it. They have some bloody smart people there at Microsoft, its too bad that internal politics rather than technology, make the decisions. If it were left to technology, we wouldn't have the half baked compromise that is UAC, for example.